Gingerbread & Pīrāgi
DECEMBER 2025
Latvian Style Christmas Treats
Some of the most popular Latvian foods around the world are those prepared and enjoyed at Christmas. During this festive season, Latvians in every corner of the globe – from Riga to Chicago, from Costa Rica to New Zealand – bake and savor both pīrāgi and piparkūkas. These warm, comforting little pastries filled with bacon, along with the fragrant, spiced gingerbread cookies, help create a sense of home and belonging even far away from Latvia. As families prepare them together, conversations flow, stories and memories are shared, and the beautiful moments of togetherness that connect generations come alive. The aroma of pīrāgi and gingerbread fills homes with a feeling of celebration and warmth.
In many diaspora communities, piparkūkas and pīrāgi can not only be bought as homemade treats but even ordered by mail. Often, hundreds of pastries are baked in group efforts at Latvian schools or community organizations to raise funds for local activities and to bring a touch of Latvian Christmas spirit to countless Latvian homes around the world.
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Aivars Sinka: "Quite often my English acquaintances wanted to try baking pīrāgi, so I wrote the recipe in English. I used to bake a lot. It felt important to me that my daughters understood that Latvian food is different from English food. I often put a pīrāgs in their school lunchbox. I bake my pīrāgi using the same recipe my mother used and, very likely, the one her...
Ilma Wilkinson: "I bake piparkūkas every year — for me, Christmas just isn’t Christmas without “real” Latvian gingerbread. We used to bake together as a family, but when we moved to Shanghai in 2004, we began inviting friends and colleagues to join the tradition — Chinese, Australians, Europeans. In the early years, finding all the necessary spices was more difficult, and some I even had to grind myself....
My mother first baked this recipe before 1951. I remember how she and her friend, in the heat of the Australian summer, would spend hours rolling out the dough, cutting it, and baking batch after batch so there would be enough gingerbread for both families to give to colleagues, teachers, and friends. I still recall the enormous mountains of gingerbread that covered almost the entire kitchen counter! We...
The founder of the Latvians Abroad Museum and Research Center museum shares the story of her family’s pīrāgi baking tradition. The Hinkle family includes several vegetarians, so they have had to invent various filling variations that everyone would enjoy. The family’s creative approach to pīrāgi doesn’t stop at the filling – for convenience, they use store-bought bun dough, and a ravioli press is used to shape the pīrāgi!
Līva, a home economics teacher in New Zealand, says that pīrāgi give her a feeling of warmth and home. She has treated her colleagues at school to pīrāgi and has even included making them as an assignment for her students in cooking class...
Dace Dambergs has a ""foolproof"" pīrāgi recipe, that she has adapted from Mrs Silmanis' 1960s recipe for ""Savoury Bacon Rolls"", which she entered in to the iconic Australian women's magazine ""The Women's Weekly"" recipe competition, winning a prize. Dace explains: ""The art of making pīrāgi is steeped in Latvian legend and folklore. For centuries grandmothers, mothers and daughters sat around many a table plying their art and chatting...
Inga, who now lives in Costa Rica, bakes piparkūkas and pīrāgi every year together with her sons. She talks about her experience searching for ingredients that are not always easy to find in Costa Rica, and fondly remembers her family’s Christmas traditions from her childhood.
PipArkūkas & Pīrāgi DECEMBER 2025 Pīrāgi baking workshop (Brisbane Latvian Community) BrisbANE, Australia The Brisbane Latvian Community reports: “Inhale — can you still smell that fresh batch of pīrāgi straight from the oven? We can, and we’re still smiling! In October 2025 a pīrāgi making workshop was held at the Brisbane Latvian Hall. What a warm, delicious, and joy-filled afternoon it was!The wonderful Dace Dambergs guided us through...
Irene Kreilis: “I prepare braised cabbage according to my own recipe: white pepper, bay leaves, fry the bacon, grind it, fry the onions, caraway seeds. A good amount of brown sugar also helps — half a cup. Six hours in the oven. As it bakes, the edges burn, and that’s the most delicious part. I grate carrots. The cabbage can be reheated for a week. The children complained...
Amanda, a Canadian married to a Canadian-Latvian, values passing culture on to her daughter, including her husband’s heritage. She had always wanted to try making pīrāgi, and has finally begun the journey of learning and perfecting the recipe. After two unsuccessful, though still delicious, attempts, Amanda turned to the Facebook group “Latvian Favorite Foods,” asking for help, wondering what she was doing wrong, and looking for advice.
Inga shares her many years of experience in baking piparkūkas and pīrāgi. She believes that there are no secrets to making pīrāgi, people shouldn’t be afraid to give it a try, because it’s really not that difficult. However, when it comes to piparkūkas, the secret ingredient, according to Inga, is faith in the dough!
For Ilze, piparkūkas has always been a part of Christmas. Now, living in Italy, she organizes piparkūku camps that bring together other Latvians living in Italy, as well as participants from Luxembourg and Germany. For three days they bake, cook food, eat, dance, sing, and simply enjoy being together. In 2023, Ilze received the “Zelta pūka” award for her piparkūka camp.